Deadpool returns with… well it’s more Deadpool.
A transcript of this review will be up soon…ish.
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Wes Anderson’s second animated feature is his most entertaining yet!
Isle of Dogs is the latest work of style-supremo Wes Anderson. It is his second crack at stop motion animation but this is a marked improvement on Fantastic Mr Fox.
You feel that Anderson wouldn’t have got back to stop motion unless he felt he had a great story to tell, and that’s true of this film. It’s a dog-based caper and is perhaps one of Anderson’s most fun and enjoyable movies to date.
I saw this in a cinema full of kids during the Easter holidays but I think it’s fair to say that this isn’t really a film for children despite the PG rating. There’s the usual sense of melancholy which doesn’t really chime for younger viewers but I think anyone can enjoy the incredibly detailed animation so perhaps I’m not the right person to say that.
And that is a great point to start on. The level of detail and thought that has gone into every frame is incredible. The Isle of Dogs is an abandoned island upon which all of the dogs in the fictional city of Megasaki are banished after an epidemic of dog flu breaks out. There are two narratives at play; one is a young boy’s desire to find his pet dog which was sent to the island and the other is of the dog’s desire to flee the island and overcome the dog flu. The settings are divided between this island and Megasaki city. The island is a place in decay, abandoned by humans and now serving as little more than a rubbish dump. The beautifully detailed mise-en-scene makes this animated world feel real and genuinely inhospitable. The city seems vast and densly populated and demostrates extensive research into Japanese culture and architecture. A couple of scenes which demonstrate this are one in which sushi is prepared and another where a kidney is transplated. It sounds completely inane but it is honestly staggering. It’s probably the most I have been in awe of something in a film for some time.
You might be concerned by the fact that all of the human characters speak Japanese in the film without any subtitles. But Anderson deals with this intelligently. During the speeches, an interpreter, voiced by Frances McDormand sits in a booth as if to translate it to a television audience watching at home. Greta Gerwig voices Tracy Walker, a foreign exchange student, who acts as another means of translating the words of the Japanese human characters. It’s hard to explain the ways in which Anderson achieves this but he does very well in making this accessible.
The rest of the voice cast is superb. This animated film gives the director a chance to work with many of his regular muses as well as a host of new talents. The actors’ doggy doubles are perfect. Gondo is a rough around the edges gangster dog voiced by Harvey Keitel while Scarlett Johansson voices an immaculately groomed pooch.
The cast deliver some very funny dog-based lines – even for those like myself who wouldn’t claim to be ‘dog’ people. Bryan Cranstone voices Chief, who is perhaps main dog of the piece. He repeats the warning ‘I bite’. The way that Anderson maps human personality traits onto the dogs whilst they retain their canine characteristics has neither the cuteness of Disney nor the abrasiveness of Family Guy. They are melancholic muts.
For me Fantastic Mr Fox felt like a bit of a mistep for Anderson. The character and story was well loved and well known in its original literary form by Roald Dahl. With Isle of Dogs, Anderson has more creative freedom and uses it to create a film that has all the fun, adventure and wonderful camera work of Moonrise Kingdom or Grand Budapest Hotel. It does carry on in the vein of those films rather than Anderson’s early work but that’s no bad thing. There is enough there to please the hardcore fans.
As for the soundtrack, whilst there is only one pop song used in the film, the score is absolutely brilliant and more than makes up for it. I love the music in Anderson’s films but I didn’t find myself wishing for 60s pop over Alexandre Desplat’s wonderful score.
Being released so soon after the awards season you know that this movie will disregarded by the big awards next season. But that’s fine. This is a fun film which doesn’t claim to be anything more. If you love Wes Anderson it is essential viewing, if you love dogs it’s essential viewing or if have even just a passing interest in films and want to see stop-motion animation at its absolute peak then this is a must. If it isn’t Anderson’s best film, it is at least his most mainstream.
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Reel Opinions is a UK based film review group that covers just about anything. From reviews of terrible movies to interviews with casts and directors Reel Opinions covers everything we can be bothered to make.
Ben offers up a review of Danny Boyle’s latest, a sequel to his 1996 cult hit Trainspotting.
Jack struggles to understand basic humour.
Jack reviews Icelandic comedy Rams and goes on about how great sheep are.
A weekend getaway for four couples takes a sharp turn when one of the couples discovers the entire trip was orchestrated to host an intervention on their marriage.
A 13-year-old rapper focused on hip-hop stardom falls for a rebellious classmate after moving from the U.S. to Germany with his widowed father.
You can spot a Shane Black film from a mile away: the punchy dialogue, bromantic leads and festive settings seem to have run through almost every Black production since he first showed up in Hollywood back in the 1980s.
Hell, even his random foray into the comic-book world with Marvel’s bravely hilarious Iron Man 3 found the same formula. And now, thankfully his latest venture, The Nice Guys, proves how it’s still 100% relevant and entertaining, even after all these years.
A hot-pants laden, disco-dancing 70s-set neo-noir, The Nice Guys finds L.A. muscle-man Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) crossing paths with crooked private detective and single father Holland March (Ryan Gosling) over the case of a missing girl. With their investigations running nowhere fast, the two partner-up and hit the streets, uncovering a murderous plot of corruption and oddly enough, pornography, along the way, all whilst joined by March’s punchy teen daughter Holly (Angourie Rice).
Yes, I did just use the words ‘pornography’ and ’teen daughter’ in the same sentence: this is far from the sort of politically sound filmmaking Hollywood has become more accustomed to as of late. Characters battle alcoholism, porn stars flail around in very little clothing and the entire plot basically revolves around the moral corruption of the two leads. It’s classical crime fiction finally back in motion, and Black embraces every last ounce of it.
If these are the sorts of films that often offend you, it’s worth switching off here. To everyone else: The Nice Guys might well be one of the most confident and well-honed films of the year. Part 40s-noir throwback (complete with hard-boiled voiceovers et al), part 70s-detective treat (think The French Connection with more laughs), Black’s creation is both relentlessly funny and one of the most dramatically riveting mysteries in a long while.
Although it might be Black’s and Anthony Bagarozzi’s script that does a great deal of the talking, happily feeding out morsels of plot wrapped in tight humour, just as much of the praise should be shared between their leading men.
Despite a few dodgy turns more recently, Crowe hits back with one of his most badass performances to date, shelling out heaps of the film’s best action set-pieces, whilst always remaining a cuddly teddy-bear type at heart. His ongoing back-and-forths with the ever-reliable Gosling sweep up most of the laughs (the rest snatched away by the easily loveable Rice), and the pair’s expected chemistry is a solid delight from start to finish.
Slide in an effortlessly glam setting, a twisty plot and a hefty supporting cast and what remains is a riotously good time at the movies. Well-shot, well-crafted and oozing with nostalgia, it’s a fun-fuelled, witty wake-up call to the heavily-saturated shelves of Hollywood today: old-school genres definitely still have their place.
And hell, with its semi-sequel-bait ending, we could even be looking at a new franchise altogether: Lethal Weapon for the 21st-century. Either way, whether that happens or not, The Nice Guys will always remain an insanely fun reminder of what we might be missing out on.
The Nice Guys is released in the UK on 3rd June by Icon Entertainment.
Ben and Matt discuss the latest Coen Brothers feature. Talking everything from genre, script, and cinematography.
Straight from the example page of “How to write a Teen film” it’s the Sex-Comedy-Zombie-Horror film of the season, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse.
Life-long friends Ben, Carter, and Augie (Tye Sheridan Logan Miller and Joey Morgan), are scouts, the lowest on the high school food chain, but with an invite to the coolest party of the year their luck might finally be about to change; that is before the undead begin to rise.
The plot, script, characters, jokes, cinematography, editing, acting, everything really, is basic. It doesn’t make the film particularly bad in any way, but it isn’t going to be anyone’s favourite film of the year – bar a few hormone driven teenagers. You know the characters instantly as you’ve seen a million variations of them in the past, so when they get put into these scenarios the audience not only knows the outcome, but who is going to say what to who, as though hearing half-forgotten jokes from a previous film. If I were asked to produce a poster quote it would be “Superbad Fan-Fiction: The Movie”.
The comedy mostly revolves around two things, blood and genitals, sometimes at the same time. If the blood isn’t present then they’re generally talking about where they are going to put their genitals. Occasionally there are flashes of self-awareness, a zombie intentionally breaking the conventions, or a joke playing on your expectations, but then these moments are always lost by the gag just around the corner. As for the action pieces they do manage to get some practical laughs, although they may be after you squirm in your seat a little. It’s cringe humour essentially, part for the imagined pain of the character, second for the fact that someone decided to write that.
The moments that induce this mostly are the unnecessary focus on zombie boobs. Why? This film is not suggesting some deep physiological thesis about necrophilia, it genuinely thinks it’s sexy, and it’s uncomfortable. It’s not even like they used the zombie aspect as an excuse to insert these scenes and get teenage butts in seats, there is specific make up made to make them look dead. Someone was paid to make their breasts look deceased and then shake them in front of a slow-mo cam, just let that sink in a moment.
When the action scenes do eventually attempt to progress the plot they are confusing and badly choreographed. In the final showdown everything but the protagonists blasting off their weapons is indistinguishable; you can barely tell the difference between the undead and their victims. It’s a motion blur fest of bad editing, blinding lens flares, and CGI blood splats.
At the end of the film I was left with a slightly bad taste in my mouth. Some critics have lamented on the film’s bad taste (true), gross out humour (true), and sexism (very true), and the effect it will have on the teen demographic that the film is aimed towards. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is bad enough to make the world a worse place, it certainly won’t make the arseholes of the world stop and think on their actions; for those kids it’s more like an accepting smile.
Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse (2015), directed by Christopher Landon, is released in the UK on 6th November by Paramount Pictures. Certificate 15.
We finally get around to reviewing the teen-sex-horror-romp of the season
Reel Opinions 